Pianist-Composer Michael Stephen Brown To Return To Moab Music Festival This Month

The lauded American pianist and composer Michael Stephen Brown is returning to the popular Moab Music Festival for two concerts in Moab, UT, August 29-30, 2024.

On Thursday morning August 29, 2024, 11 a.m. MDT, Mr. Brown will appear in a concert entitled "Grotto I: 19th Century Classics" and perform Brahms's Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34.

This program, aiming to showcase two of the greatest German masterpieces for piano and strings, will also include Robert Schumann's Piano Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 47. The concert is slated to take place at a pristine wilderness grotto carved from the surrounding red rocks, offering audiences a rich sonic tapestry of music with one of the most stunning natural environments imaginable.

Mr. Brown will be joined by colleagues: Miclen LaiPang, violin; Aubree Oliverson, violin; Simone Porter, violin; Cynthia Phelps, viola; Jay Campbell, cello; Matthew Zalkind, cello; and Derek Wang, piano.

The second concert, "Floating Concert I: Keyboards On The Colorado," will take place on Friday morning, August 30, 2024, 8:30 a.m. MDT. Mr. Brown will join fellow pianist Derek Wang and percussionist Ian Rosenbaum; the three musicians will present pieces celebrating water and the river on an open-air riverboat. A highlight of this concert will be Mr. Brown's most recent composition "The Lotos-Eaters," which just received its world premiere at Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival. The full program follows:

Gabriel Fauré Barcarolle No. 5, Op. 66 in F-sharp minor

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky June: Barcarolle from The Seasons

Maurice Ravel Une barque surl'océan [A Boat on the Ocean] from Miroirs

Bedřich Smetana The Moldau from Vltava

Michael Stephen Brown The Lotos-Eaters

For the concert "Grotto I: 19th Century Classics," general admission of $490 is available for purchase on the event page. General admission is $185 for the "Floating Concert I: Keyboards On The Colorado" program; while tickets have already sold out, a few tickets might become available from time to time by checking with the Festival box office at 435-259-7003. For more information, please visit pianist Michael Stephen Brown's website and Moab Music Festival's website.

A frequent performer of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Mr. Brown, whose artistry is shaped by his creative voice as a pianist and composer, was featured by the Society this season with a solo recital at Alice Tully Hall. 

As a guest soloist, Mr. Brown has performed with the Seattle Symphony, the National Philharmonic, and the Grand Rapids, North Carolina, Wichita, New Haven, and Albany Symphonies. He has appeared in recital at Carnegie Hall, the Mostly Mozart Festival, and Lincoln Center. He regularly collaborates with his longtime duo partner, cellist Nicholas Canellakis, and has been featured at numerous festivals including Tanglewood, Marlboro, Music@Menlo, Gilmore, Ravinia, Saratoga, Bridgehampton, Caramoor, Music in the Vineyards, Bard, Sedona, Moab, and Tippet Rise.

Mr. Brown performed at the 2023 Bard Festival and was singled out by Times critic David Allen: "Young artists excelled in all these concerts, not least the pianist Michael Stephen Brown, whose poised refinement made an early student piece by Smyth, her Sarabande in D minor, sound like a mature masterpiece." - The New York Times, August 8, 2023

Mr. Brown recently toured his own Concerto for Piano and Strings (2020) throughout the United States and Poland with several orchestras. He has received commissions from the Gilmore Piano Festival; the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra; the New Haven and Maryland Symphony Orchestras; Concert Artists Guild; Chamber Music Sedona; Music in the Vineyards; Shriver Hall; Osmo Vänskä, pianists Jerome Lowenthal, Ursula Oppens, Orion Weiss, Adam Golka, and Roman Rabinovich.

A prolific recording artist, his latest album Noctuelles, featuring Ravel's Miroirs and newly discovered movements by Medtner was called "a glowing presentation" by BBC Music Magazine. He can be heard as soloist with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot in the music of Messiaen, and as soloist with the Brandenburg State Symphony in music by Samuel Adler. Other albums include Beethoven's Eroica Variations; all-George Perle; and collaborative albums each with pianist Jerome Lowenthal, cellist Nicholas Canellakis, and violinist Elena Urioste. He is now embarking on a multi-year project to record the complete piano music by Felix Mendelssohn including world premiere recordings of music by one of Mendelssohn's muses, Delphine von Schauroth.

Recipient of many awards, Mr. Brown was the winner of the 2018 Emerging Artist Award from Lincoln Center and a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant. Other awards include the First Prize winner of the Concert Artists Guild Competition, the Bowers Residency from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (formerly CMS Two), and the Juilliard Petschek Award. Mr. Brown is a Steinway Artist.

Mr. Brown earned dual bachelor's and master's degrees in piano and composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with pianists Jerome Lowenthal and Robert McDonald and composers Samuel Adler and Robert Beaser. Additional mentors have included András Schiff and Richard Goode as well as his early teachers, Herbert Rothgarber and Adam Kent. A native New Yorker, he lives there with his two 19th-century Steinway D's, Octavia and Daria.

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